Electrical harnesses are typically made of electrical conductor wires which are mostly individual, stranded, and insulated wires with an occasional uninsulated stranded or solid wire utilized for grounding or the like. These wires are typically terminated by electrical terminals and/or connectors and formed into some general shape suitable for inventory and handling by the use of tape or harness ties. Fasteners may or may not be employed to affix the harness to the apparatus in which the harness is used. The harness wires serve the function of supplying power to the various components of such apparatus or signals for either control or machine intelligence purposes and, as mentioned, ground and/or shielding circuit functions. The harness may be a simple one, having only several short wires but a few inches in length utilized to interconnect the components of a simple circuit in an apparatus such as a camera or smoke alarm or, it may have literally hundreds of wires terminated in very expensive connectors and utilized to interconnect all of the different devices and components of a complex circuit as in an aircraft. The harness may be premade in large part to be loaded into the apparatus on a production line as, for example, with respect to appliances such as washers, dryers, copy machines, stoves, refrigerators and the like; or, added piece meal in subassembly fashion as the apparatus moves along a production line. Generally speaking, a harness is a flexible assembly having a non-rigid shape, such as a plurality of discrete wires which are bundle tied together and terminated at ends thereof for interconnection to a panel or other end components. These harnesses are difficult to handle by machine, making it difficult to automate either harness making or harness handling. This fact has frustrated industry for decades and, notwithstanding substantial efforts to automate or robotize harness making or harness manipulation, most harnesses are currently manufactured and installed in a highly labor intensive manner which impacts not only on cost but also on quality.
A significant step toward automatic wire handling in the last decade has come with the concept of implanting conductor wires into preformed grooves having a desired geometry and/or distribution. This technique is taught in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,891,013 and 3,871,072, as well as in U.S. Pat. No. 4,076,365. These patents deal with spreading conductors for the purpose of location for termination and, in the latter case, include grooves in the connector housing into which conductor wires are driven. U.S. Pat. No. 4,132,251 teaches a similar concept but employs a tool which rolls the wires into the grooves. A further teaching yet is found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,132,252 and 4,125,137 relating to rolling techniques wherein wires are spread into grooves by rolling tools preparatory to termination.
The wire implanting technique disclosed in this prior art allows a number of wires to be positioned and placed rather exactly for subsequent processing such as termination in an automatic or semiautomatic fashion which minimizes the need for labor in handling the different wires and vastly increases the productivity for such wire handling and placement. It represents, nevertheless, only a fraction of the overall labor in forming harnesses or subharnesses, the nature of the harness in being flexible and difficult to handle remaining as a challenge.